It might be worth noting that I ran into a rather unexpected glitch with my last new machine. Many of the newer sound cards are aimed at "home theater" use, and give you 5 to 7 speaker channels on the output panel for your "surround sound theater" - but omit the MIDI connector. There just isn't room on one slot plate for all the ins and outs. The machine came with a pretty good sound card, but with no way to connect my MIDI keyboard (that I use mostly for score input.)
Looking for fixes, I found it very difficult to find specific enough information about several of the "very best" sound cards to be able to tell whether they would solve my hookup problem. The info is there, but you have to know that you need to dig it out, and you may have to dig pretty deep.
Most cards that have this problem give you a "piggy back" connector - sometimes special order at extra cost, but that uses another card slot (wasting a slot, with nothing plugged into it) which wasn't satisfactory for my situation.
I went with the Creative Audigy2 external unit, just to get the connector(s). It was best suited to my "mechanical" setup. The specs are excellent; but since I'm not really into audio to any extent, I can't give you much in the way of comparative info.
It's very easy to find all the "new features," but disgustingly difficult to find out about it if they decided to leave out something you expect - like that MIDI connector.